When $15 For A Salad Is A Good Deal
There were cheaper things on the menu. But, there were two problems. First, I didn’t have a lot of time. I only had a 15 minutes before they started bordering. The Ice bar was right across from my gate.
So, I could stand to linger over my salad until boarding started. When I travel I always like to eat at the bar. You get better service and it’s just friendlier. And you can see the TV’s. The Ice was showing the final round of the Masters on one TV and some rodeo from Las Vegas on the other TV. The bull riding was more interesting than the putting. Eventually, some of the other people at the bar got them to turn on the Masters.
What is too expensive? Is $1 for a bottle of water too much? It’s only a few pennies worth of water. Why is it $1? Worse yet, sometimes it’s $5. It depends on the location.
If you’re sitting in your kitchen, $1 is too much.
If you’re in a football stadium on a hot August afternoon, $5 sounds about right.
If you are lost in the desert no price is too high.
I wasn’t exactly in the middle of the desert, but I also wasn’t in the middle of my kitchen. I was on a trip once again.
See, my second problem was that I recently lost a lot of weight. (How I Lost 30 lbs . . And Why You Can’t.) Except it’s up to 37 lbs now and I want to drop the last 8. I was 165 lbs when I graduated from high school. Six months ago I was 210 lbs.
Six months I’d worked on that goal. What was a reasonable price to hold on to that goal? 5$? 10$? Or was it worth $15 for a platefull of lettuce?
It’s not just lettuce.
How often do we walk away from our goals because of the cost?
I’ve been writing this blog for over two years. I’m amazed that some of you find value, or at least a little entertainment in the poor scribblings I put down on this electronic paper. I often talk to people who want to write. When they hear I write five days a week, they always say the same thing,
How do you find the time?
The answer is that I don’t. None of us “find” time. Ben Franklin, more than 200 years ago pointed out that we all have the same amount. So, I don’t “find” time, I “make” it. There have been plenty of times that I’ve been so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes opened for more than a sentence or two. Feel free to speculate which posts those were. I’ll give you a hint, they typically had the most typos.
But, like my $15 salad at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, it’s worth it because it’s a goal I set a long time ago and I have yet to find something, certainly not sleep, that I like more than having been a consistent writer for the past two years.
What is your goal? What is your $15 salad?
Whatever it is, to others it is going to appear to be WAY overpriced. It’s not. Just remember what you’re doing it for.
It’s definitely worth it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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